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Founders Doom

Founders is great at making beers. Especially (since they got a shit ton of ‘em) ones that are both highly sought after and hard to find. Somehow, I’ve been pretty lucky so far in being able to try each one at least once. However, it’s usually been after a several months long ordeal of emotionally adjusting to the fact that, while each beer in question is definitely terrific and I am terrific, it still doesn’t mean we’ll ever meet each other. Long after I’ve torn down the bedroom posters and disposed of the tear-drenched crumpled paper, I’ll wander into a bar only to be thrown off by the nonchalant little asshole tap handle perched on the bar, getting the occasional (but not as occasional it should be) handy from the bartender. The brain isn’t designed to handle the drama of a situation such as this. Calcium receptors can only shit out substrates from the left side to the right as fast as my eyeballs can squint out the cursive on the handle. As soon as the detonation signal is sent to my heart the signal necessary to abort it is immediately sent, and the result is an accusation of attempted murder against a renowned Midwestern brewery as well as some extra sweaty palms. Each time this happened, I was all at once glad, angry, and afraid; but mostly afraid. Afraid of what the next ghastly surprise of a double-imperial-maple-bourbon-sour-session-brambleberry-rye-liquor appearance would do for my cholesterol.

So it was a refreshing feeling yesterday when I heard that DOOM!!!!, a beer it seems I’d only heard of for about a week, was being tapped at Pracna, a bar advantageously placed right in the middle of my bike ride from work to home. This DOOM!!!!! hadn’t yet caused several nights of dark, sentimental turmoil and bloody stools to neurotically call my eye doctor about. No baggage, I can do this. When I was poured the beer, I felt empowered by remaining ignorant of even what basic style it was supposed to be. Not good enough to interest me, not good enough to break my heart, that’s how I’ll approach uncertainty in life from now on. Turns out it was just some bourbon barrel-aged Imperial IPA, another attempt at being the polymath of hype beers. The emphasis here is on the “Imperial” connotation, that is, separating it from ”Double,” which would insinuate double the ingredients (specifically the hops) and thus the prominence of hops. This is actually Double Trouble aged, you can tell. After aging, the only hop character that survived was in the easy bitter taste and the anomalous pineapple in the aroma. The majority of this beer was an all too familiar maple syrupy-bourbon that I by now have been conditioned to think is normal in beer. There was a peculiar vanilla sugar at the end that would come to resemble straight-up cake frosting the more I drank. In a last ditch effort to win my curiosity and therefore the ability to destroy my sense of stable identity with which I can draw comfort and use to promote my independence, DOOM!!!!!! had decided to make my burps taste like car air fresheners. Nice try, baby, but I’ll first have to read some asshole’s blog about you and then go through some unrelated life-debilitating event before you can use that to rule over me.

P.S.A. – If you or someone you know is going through tough times in a relationship, whether it’s with with a distant beer who’s never around when you need it to be or one who’s physically abusive, call the hotline listed in the next Beer Hole article right now.